I'm beginning to feel unexpectedly emotional about it and I'm not looking forward to going to the office to say goodbye on Friday.
I hope that it goes well. If there is anybody there that you don't feel enamoured with, resist the temptation to tell them what you think of them!
Don't let them ply you with drink! When I quit my factory job to go to university, my workmates got me very drunk at the pub on the final Friday lunchtime and I had an industrial accident that afternoon that could easily have killed me (I toppled a tall pile of hard, heavy, sharp-cornered floor panels onto my unprotected head).
I am sure that you will get a much better send off than I did at another company. Someone organised a collection for me and I was handed a small unwrapped cardboard box. I opened it, anxious to discover what was inside. Oh great... a pile of
loose change! I'm talking 1ps, 2ps, a few 5ps and a few higher value coins adding up to about £10, but nobody had even bothered to replace the coins with a £10 note! I felt totally p*ssed off with the whole lot of them. I'd rather that they hadn't bothered having a collection.
When collection boxes went round the office way back then (1990s) I used to put a £1 coin in if I didn't know the person, or a £5 note if I
did. I worked in a small team of 7 or 8 people, with another 40 in the same office, and another 100-odd elsewhere in the building. It would only have taken 3 of my team to cough up a fiver and that by itself would have been £15, 50% more than what I actually got. Bitter...
moi?